Articles of Faith

'On a rainy morning in late September 2010," Lawrence Wright recounts in "Going Clear," representatives of the Church of Scientology met in New York with him and a number of his colleagues at the New Yorker, from David Remnick, the magazine's editor, to its head of fact-checking and its in-house lawyer.

The Scientology delegation brought with them forty-eight three-ring binders of supporting material, stretching...